Oliver Stone: “Conspiracy Theorist? Who, me…?”

Film director, Oliver Stone, famously knows a thing or three about conspiracies. Odd then, that when telling the Sunday Times about his next project, the “Secret History of America” he should have fallen foul of the hoary old one about Jews running the world.

Stone’s comments appeared at the end of an interview with Camilla Long and they were neither challenged; nor referred to in the headlines and sub-headlines accompanying the article. This was how it appeared

“Hitler did far more damage to the Russians than [to] the Jewish people, 25 or 30m.”

[Long asks] Why such a focus on the Holocaust then?

“The Jewish domination of the media” he says. “There’s a major lobby in the United States. They are hard workers. They stay on top of every comment, the most powerful lobby in Washington. Israel has f***** up United States foreign policy for years.”

“In trying to make a broader historical point about the range of atrocities the Germans committed against many people, I made a clumsy association about the Holocaust, for which I am sorry and I regret.”

“Jews obviously do not control media or any other industry. The fact that the Holocaust is still a very important, vivid and current matter today is, in fact, a great credit to the very hard work of a broad coalition of people committed to the remembrance of this atrocity – and it was an atrocity.”

Stone’s limited apology, released via his publicist, Rubenstein Communications, says nothing about “the most powerful lobby in Washington”: but then again, why would it? After all, isn’t that what simply everybody who’s anybody is saying these days?

Still, the allegation that Jews run the media and entertainment (and P.R.?) industries is merely one part of the conspiracy charge that Jews run the world. Jews don’t do stuff for any old reason.

Of course, Stone didn’t actually say that Jews run the world, or even that they run America. Read his words again: he only said that they dominate the media. He didn’t say who actually comprises the “major lobby”, nor who the “hard workers” that comprise “the most powerful lobby in Washington” actually are. He does, however, seem to know the product of their work, “Israel has f***** up United States foreign policy for years.”

Stone appears too busy to schlep his way through that mother of all conspiracies, the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Perhaps he’d be better off trying to read the abbreviated Protocols so usefully provided by the Britons Publishing Society in 1936. This is how it opens:

Note the bits in italics, how congruous the words “Jewry” and “leaders of Zionism” are.

This is what the Nazi Britons then say about Jews running the media:

“Protocol No.2 says:- ‘…there is a great force that can be made to mould the thoughts of the people, and that is the Press. But the Gentile States have not known how to make use of this force, and it has fallen into our hands. Through the press we have gained the power to influence the public while remaining ourselves in the shade…”

“We have been able to manufacture public opinion, and thus to compel the governments to move in the direction in which we desire them to move.”

By the 1980s, the antisemitic rag, “Holocaust News”, formerly peddled on street corners by the BNP (including its then deputy leader Richard Edmonds) put it like this (in the original, the 2nd paragraph appears in bold):

“…Jews are grotesquely over-represented on the boards of companies which own TV networks, radio stations, newspapers, film studios, book publishers and other enterprises which the public relies upon for information…”

“These media Jews are, for the most part, not merely sympathetic to Zionism but organised Zionist activists. As such they ruthlessly and arrogantly exploit their power to influence the public mind in the service of Zionism.”

The BNP don’t do “Holocaust News” any more, but in the 1990s their current leader, Nick Griffin, authored “Who Are The Mindbenders?”. The answer to Griffin’s question was no surprise: people with Jewish names, scores of them. Griffin did, however, make a witty little rejoinder against the claims of antisemitism that would inevitably accompany such a publication

“Our quarrel is with the Mind-Benders in the media, not with law-abiding tailors and dentists.”

“When a presumptive US presidential candidate arrives in Jerusalem, he willingly dons a jacket designed by Israeli tailors.”

Of course, the difference is that Griffin’s tailors were Jewish: whereas the Guardian’s were Israeli. It is the crucial conceit that Stone failed to observe when he said that Jews dominate the American media: had he merely stuck to the Zionist motif then he could have been right up there in the pantheon withMearsheimer & Walt.

But he didn’t. Instead, Stone blew it and trespassed onto Mel Gibson’s set. Will theGuardian, theIndependent, theNew Statesman, theLondon Review of Bookset al cast it up to him when he comes selling his finished “Secret History of America”? Don’t bet on it. After all, people in anti-Zionist glass houses…

Post navigation

“The fact that the Holocaust is still a very important, vivid and current matter today is, in fact, a great credit to the very hard work of a broad coalition of people committed to the remembrance of this atrocity”

I dunno, Oliver. Your first reference to “hard work” had a very different tone to it.